Matt looked like he wanted to say more, but the door to the conference room opened, and Reid Harrington entered, followed by several members of the organization’s staff.
“Good morning,” Reid said. He unbuttoned his suit jacket and took a seat at the head of the table. “I appreciate you both coming in, and before we jump into the logistics, I want to say something, and I want to make sure you hear it.” He looked at Evan, then at CJ. “What you are about to navigate is going to be hard, and what happens in this room today matters. But nothing is more important than making sure that both of you come out of this okay. The organization’s position on this is straightforward: we will handle whatever comes next in a way that is best for you. Not the team, not the optics. You.”
Evan hadn’t known what to expect from this meeting, but it definitely hadn’t been that. He looked at Reid, trying to figure out what his angle was, and Reid looked back at him with a steady expression. Evan nodded.
“Okay,” he said, and CJ echoed him.
Reid nodded once, then turned to the team’s communications director Claire Davis, who opened the folder in front of her and started laying out the potential plans.
They spent two hours in that room while Claire walked them through the options: the statements, the timing, the different ways they could frame it and what each one would and wouldn’t accomplish. She had an opinion, which she offered once and didn’t repeat, that their strongest option was to issue a brief joint statement that confirmed what the picture showed and didn’t explain anything further. It acknowledged without overexplaining, it was on their terms, and it left no room for anyone else to confirm, deny, or speculate because they’d already said the thing themselves.
“The photo is already out there,” she said. “People have seen it. The story is out there in the form of a question. A short statement replaces the question with an answer and removes the thing they’re speculating about.” She looked at both of them. “You control it, or it controls you. That’s always the choice.”
In the end, they went with her suggestion, and that was that.
The statement was released before they left the meeting, simultaneously through both the team’s and Evan’s and CJ’s social media pages. It was four sentences long. It said that they were together, it was not new, and they would not be discussing the details of their private life beyond that. The last sentence thanked the team, the league, their teammates, and their families, and asked for the same respect due to any couple.
The notifications started immediately and did not stop. They both turned their phones off for the sake of their sanity.
They were told to report for the game that night, and the meeting disbanded. Reid walked them out. In the hallway, when Matt and Marcus were a few paces behind them discussing any potential future problems, Reid stopped and looked at them.
“For what it’s worth,” he said quietly, “I’m really proud of you guys. It takes a lot of courage to be authentic. Courage not a lot of us have.”
Evan didn’t know what to do with that, so he murmured a thank you, which felt inadequate compared to what Reid had just said. CJ shook his hand, and Reid gave them one more look before turning toward his office. Their agents were still talking, so Evan interrupted them long enough to tell them he and CJ were leaving, and then they pushed through the double doors and out into the late-morning light. They grabbed their gear from Evan’s car in the player’s lot, then stood behind the trunk for a moment.
“Rizzo’s gonna make a thing about it,” CJ said.
“Rizzo makes a thing about everything.”
“This is bigger than everything.”
Evan smiled. “Yeah. It is. Let’s get this over with.”
CJ got pulled asideby a trainer, so Evan had to face the team alone for the first time since the release of their statement. But the reaction in the clubhouse was not what Evan had been expecting, which was to say it was not the cautious, diplomatic acceptance he’d prepared himself for. It was much louder and a lot less careful than that, and it started with Rizzo.
He was already there when Evan stepped into the room, and he looked up from pulling on his compression sleeve.
“There he is!” Rizzo shouted, then he crossed the room, put both hands on Evan’s face and kissed him once, firmly, on the top of his head.
“Rizzo—”
“Nope,” Rizzo said, releasing him. “That’s all.”
Mason Keller didn’t look up from his phone before he said, “We already knew.”
Evan stared at him. “You knew?”
“I mean,” Keller said, finally looking up, “we had a theory anyway.”
“A theory.”
“More of a consensus,” Luis Alvarez chimed in from across the room.
Several people laughed, and Evan looked around the room at the faces of the men he’d played beside for years. He’d lied to these men for so many years and not a single one of them seemed to be holding it against him. His eyes started to sting and he ducked his head so no one would see.
When CJ arrived a few minutes later, he received a version of the same reception, and CJ said something that made half the room laugh. Then he was standing in front of Evan and the rest of the team had gone back to whatever they’d been doing.
Evan understood that this was how it was going to be. They weren’t going to make a big thing about it. The rest of the world would do that. These guys were just going to take this new piece of information and rearrange themselves around it because that’s what happened when teams were made of people who had already decided they were family.
